I disagree. There are definitely better and worse AV's. I prefer ESET or Kaspersky. Case in point - we had a client who was on Trend Micro's enterprise suite and when we migrated them to ESET we started seeing far more virus detection. It seems Trend wasn't flagging certain traffic or files as malicious but ESET was. Keep in mind that no AV catches everything, most are signature based so if they don't know about a malicious file, it wont be flagged.

I am using AVG and in my time I have seen the same viruses infected computers running all the big names in AV software. That is my reason to say they all pretty much the same. I also agree that some are a little better than other but not by much. I think they all have there good points and there bad points

Play around with msfvenom/encoding and test them out with MSF payloads yourself too. Big names can be bypassed too. The only ones I can say stands out are AVG and Kaspersky. They usually caught the files I created in Metasploit.

I have warmed up to Symantec's Endpoint Protection. If properly configured (AV, Network Threat Protection and Proactive Threat Protection enabled) it can hold up pretty well. It also has the ability to implement application and device whitelisting/blacklisting. That is where much of the AV bypassing payloads can be prevented. I do like ESET as well, at least at home. It does a pretty good job catching some things. Also for home MS Security Essentials was surprisingly good at detecting an infected website download that ESET and AVG missed.

For Enterprise clients I will stick with SEP, for its central management features. I have not used ESET or Kaspersky in that role, yet.

AV software is only as good as its configuration. Just like most tools, nothing out-of-the-box will block everything. Adjustments need to be made to cater to your environment.

Microsoft Security Essentials? Well for a free home AV it isn't horrible and if I am running Windows I'd much rather rely on Microsoft to know its systems better than a 3rd party in order to protect them. I usually toss it on my testing machines just because it is free. They do have an enterprise level AV - Forefront (or whatever it is being called now) which I have yet to use.